


you existed both yoked and split

by dinosaur



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Communication, Fashion & Couture, Gen, M/M, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 08:55:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5620933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaur/pseuds/dinosaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“We’re supposed to be looking at the jackets Caroline brought over,” Zayn runs his thumb along the ridged shoulders of one of the Gucci blues, tonguing at his lip. “We’re <i>shopping</i>, like.”</p><p>There’s a lull and then a clicking noise. Niall pops into view, hair messy and soft in his eyes. The casualness of him is still a static shock to Zayn’s stomach, still a little ping of, <i>oh you, there you are</i>. Zayn’s missed him so much.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you existed both yoked and split

**Author's Note:**

> spawned from this [tumblr ask](http://cactiall.tumblr.com/post/136513829705/oh-ziallll-like-just-last-year-he-went-to-exact). title taken from ['brute dictation' by jules gibbs](http://www.versedaily.org/2013/brutedictation.shtml)
> 
> the moment before the brute  
> dictation, before the grass drills
> 
> that could kill a man, when the egg  
> cracked, and you existed both yoked
> 
> and split. 
> 
>   
> thank and love, as always always, to my betas arden and gillian. <3  
>   
> 

  


Zayn whinges at the phone camera, “Nialllll.”

Niall makes a sound from off-screen, a clatter of pots and pans. Niall is cooking again, some recipe with no less than three kinds of pepper in it. Zayn’s impressed for a variety of reasons. Niall looks good red and sweating, anyway. 

“Zaaayno,” Niall calls finally.

“We’re supposed to be looking at the jackets Caroline brought over,” Zayn runs his thumb along the ridged shoulders of one of the Gucci blues, tonguing at his lip. “We’re  _shopping_ , like.”

There’s a lull and then a clicking noise. Niall pops into view, hair messy and soft in his eyes. The casualness of him is still a static shock to Zayn’s stomach, still a little ping of,  _oh you, there you are_. Zayn’s missed him so much. 

“Okay,” Niall says.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Zayn nods and Niall nods back. Bobbling his head up and down a bit just to watch Niall echo it, he giggles, forehead knocking against the cool of the clothes rack. 

Niall giggles back and it feels just like being on the boulevard, just like wandering through shops followed by a distant but tooclose gaggle of whispers, a familiar wall of support around them, nothing in the way of their day, just them out and about like it’s still 2011 and they’re trying to find a highlighter parka for Harry. Only, it also doesn’t, because here Zayn is, looking down at his hand, holding a shaking camera feed of Niall slouched across his counter and he’s changed the paint color of the walls and Zayn hasn’t seen it, wasn’t there to see Niall debate color swatches and the lines of Niall’s face are not quite like Zayn remembers and he wonders if that’s because he’s never had to  _remember_ before. 

This is only their third time talking, since. Since.

It feels easy, but then again, Niall always has. 

Zayn pulls the phone back up to his face, seeing the image of himself wobble in the too bright light of the changing room. 

“Y’good?” Niall mumbles, face pressed close.

“Yeah,” Zayn mumbles back and flips the camera back to the rack, to the blue he’d been messing with. “Whatchu think?”

“Mm,” Niall hums.

The edge of his nose is just visible, pressed almost to the camera like he’s a second away from squeezing through the screen. 

“I like the stitching,” Zayn says.

“Very poppy.”

“Pop pop.”

“Poppppp,” Niall echos, with sound effects. “Do ya wanna pop, tho?”

“Mm.” It’s a press event. _Connections_ , Sarah had said.  _Opportunities. Be seen, see, be._  “Probs.”

“What about the Owens,” Niall says. The floof of his hair ruffles in the fanned air. Zayn thinks of touching the trembling thinness of Niall’s temples, thinks  _so soft_. 

“Hmm?”

“The Owens. Rick, right? Rick Owens. You showed me it, earlier abouts.”

Zayn rubs his finger along the edge of the phone case, “didn’t think you were paying attention.”

The corner of Niall’s mouth turns up in something one shade off of a smile, “I was,” he says, “am.”

 _Were you_ , Zayn wants to ask, _were you then?_ but doesn’t. He doesn’t wanna bother with it, doesn’t wanna try and till up the loose new dirt he’s tossed over his heart, trying to get it to grow new shoots. 

Bitterness is not what he wants to water with. 

He’s keeping a petunia alive in a teacup on his kitchen sill, and something like hope and the future beating wings inside the unlocked bars of his heart and he wants something good to stay on the horizon, now. 

He thumbs his way back down the line of jackets, holding the camera so Niall can see and help say when. 

He finds it near the beginning, 2 jackets in, beside a patterned Yamamoto that Zayn isn’t sure how Caroline expects him to get on, let alone pull off. [The Owens](http://www.barneys.com/rick-owens-fractured-flight-jacket-504366937.html) is blocky mixed-media and almost strange, almost overpowered by the smooth lines and sleekness surrounding it.

“Yeah?” Zayn asks as he pulls it out. 

“Yeah,” Niall nods from the phone, “Thought of it when you passed by earlier, but it’s a bit like a -”

“Jedi,” Zayn says, as Niall does. Excitement bubbles in his stomach.

“Yeah!” Niall laughs. 

Zayn grins at the phone, looks over the jacket anew. _Maybe unzipped_ , “with something deep, a warm purp-”

“The purple-red shirt with the -” Niall gestures shapes, long fingers snapping and twisting.

“Mhm,” Zayn hums, hides a smile in his shoulder at Niall remembering, Niall thinking about his clothes, him in clothes.

Niall wrinkles his nose at the camera, wobbles the frame a bit, like he can see anyway. 

“Think a lightsaber would be too much?” Zayn asks, popping the button at the collar.

“Nah,” Niall shakes his head into the table, “figure you could get away with wearing the moon on your head, you know.”

A quiet pleasure zooms down Zayn’s spine. 

“Anyway,” Niall says, quieter, “we’ve like, gone out with water blasters before. Can’t be that unexpected.”

 _We’ve_.

His spine chills a bit, shoulders curling. The hem of the jacket feels rough.

It’s not the past that Zayn’s worried about, Zayn worried for them about. It’s them and their looking at it, that worries him. 

“Yeah,” he says, just as quiet.

He wants to learn how to navigate it, wants to learn how to call Niall up and look at him, instead of glance from the corners of his eyes. They’ve come far in just the 7 hours they’ve slopped together these 10 months, but Zayn doesn’t want to get caught up looking behind them, spend time trying to re-frame something he’s already pulled out of focus.

He wants to look forward. There has to be a point where he can stop having to go back to the beginning, to do that. 

Niall is fidgeting, tracing uneven nails across his forearms over and over again.

How to reconcile someone who is still entrenched in that, but isn’t begrudging him walking on, moving ahead, following a wobbly, sprouting tree line.

“I think it would be sick, bro,” he says, looking up to catch Niall’s jerked over eyes, he adds, ”thanks.”

“Yeah, course,” Niall gives a small nervous laugh. “Always,” he says, and then catches himself and flushes. 

How to reconcile someone who wants to see him reach the horizon, wants to wave him to the sun. 

Zayn smiles softly, leans his head against the sharp scented leather and aims his “always,” back at the camera. 

Niall breathes in for a long moment, eyes locked with Zayn, blue and deep and almost too much in some place low in Zayn’s heart. Then, Niall goes a deeper red, coughs a bit and fusses back over the stove. Listening to him go, Zayn pays attention to the careful, precise numbering of his recipe narration and thinks that, like most things cobbled and cooked up, it’s probably in the small steps. 

 _Step three_ , Zayn thinks,  _shopping trip._

_Step four, stir fry lesson._

  



End file.
